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Horses Don’t Care if the Jockey’s a Woman

Rosie Napravnik after the third race at Belmont on Saturday. She was fifth in the Kentucky Derby and third in the Preakness.Credit
John Dunn for The New York Times

The question is starting to wear on Rosie Napravnik, the way it did — and still does — on Julie Krone: what is it like being a female jockey?

Napravnik will tell you that she is a jockey, period, and that someday she hopes to be considered among the best. Krone is in that category; she is the only woman to win a Triple Crown race. In 1993, Krone charged to the lead in the Belmont homestretch aboard Colonial Affair, a highlight in a career filled with them.

This year, Napravnik, 25, is fourth in wins in the North American standings. Finishing sixth aboard the filly Unlimited Budget in the Belmont Stakes on Saturday, she became the first woman to ride in all three Triple Crown races in the same year. In 2012, she was the first woman to win the Kentucky Oaks and the second to win a Breeders’ Cup race. (Krone was the first, in 2003.)

“Being able to get to this level is really what my goals and dreams are about,” Napravnik said. “I’m just grateful to have these opportunities and want to win one of these big races.”

In last month’s Kentucky Derby, she ran fifth aboard Mylute, the highest a woman has placed in the Derby, improving on her ninth-place finish in 2011. Napravnik is one of six women to have ridden in the Derby.

“It was an exhilarating feeling at the quarter pole, knowing that I had a shot,” she said afterward. “I have never wanted to win a photo for third so bad in my life.”

She received that third-place finish from Mylute in the Preakness, as they rallied to finish behind Oxbow and Itsmyluckyday.

“It’s almost like I’ve gotten a real taste of it now, and I don’t want to quit until I win one,” Napravnik said.

Krone’s mother, Judi, a former Michigan state equestrian champion, put Julie on a horse at age 2. But Steve Cauthen’s Triple Crown ride on Affirmed in 1978 persuaded Krone to enter the hard-luck sport of horse racing. She watched Affirmed’s Belmont victory with her mother, using a fly swatter to mimic Cauthen’s moves with his whip.

Napravnik’s family also played a large role in her love of horses. Her mother trains event horses, her father is a farrier and her husband is an assistant trainer. Instead of having top jockeys as role models, Napravnik looked up to her older sister, Jazz, who is a steeplechase and flat trainer. Rosie followed Jazz into pony racing, and once she tasted the thrill of speed, she never looked back.

“I didn’t really have any opportunity to idolize them because I didn’t know much about them,” Napravnik said of female jockeys like Krone. “I never saw them ride; I saw pictures of them.”

Like Krone, Napravnik soon found that her horsemanship skills fit perfectly into the world of thoroughbred racing, winning the first race she rode in, at 17. She initially rode under the name A. R. Napravnik to hide that she was a woman so she could secure mounts more easily. But Napravnik said her overall experience had not been that challenging.

“It really was the first- and second-generation female riders that opened the doors for someone like me,” she said. “I didn’t have to go through any traumatic experiences being a female jockey. It’s just up to any female rider to have the talent, the drive, the skill and the determination to be in a male-dominated sport, which sometimes it isn’t easy, but it’s not unheard-of anymore. It hasn’t been for a while. It’s just been a while since a female rider has been in the spotlight.”

As Napravnik’s wins have piled up, so has the attention paid to her; she was recently featured on “60 Minutes.” In 1989, Krone made the cover of Sports Illustrated under the headline “Reining Lady: Julie Krone, the Best Woman Jockey Ever.”

Krone, a headstrong jockey, did not want to be singled out as a woman. Like Napravnik, she wanted to be the best. Period.

“I can honestly say I really disregarded it to such a point that I stopped noticing it,” Krone, 49, said of the gender issue. “If I chose to notice it, I chose to notice it for my own reasons and under my own powers. I didn’t really participate in it, and I didn’t experience it like the other girls might have experienced it. And I didn’t experience life as a boy, so I don’t know the difference.”

Krone recalled the days at Santa Anita Park, where the women’s jockeys room was 70 yards from the men’s, on the other side of the paddock. She relied on her valet to tell her what was going on in there.

“We told management that this was not working,” she said. “We need access to the food room, we need access to the stables, and we need access to the telephone in case something goes wrong. We were so removed from the other jockeys, were so removed from the area of the participation of the flow of these athletes.”

She eventually moved herself into the main jockeys room, putting up a curtain for privacy. But she said she did not mind; she was one of the guys. Santa Anita’s women’s jockeys room is now next to the men’s.

Krone, who in 2000 was the first woman inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame, says she is awed by Napravnik’s success. She sends congratulatory messages to Napravnik’s mother on Facebook.

“It makes me smile,” said Krone, who has a 7-year-old daughter and is a natural horsemanship instructor in California. “It’s really cool what she is doing. But again, they genderize it. Just let her be an athlete.”

Twenty years after Krone rode into Belmont history, Napravnik did not fare as well. Still, Krone sees big things on the horizon.

“She has the fortitude and desire that you can’t measure, and she is so entrenched and engulfed in her passion for the sport,” Krone said. “She is an unconscious performer. She has all the ingredients.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 9, 2013, on page SP11 of the New York edition with the headline: As Two Trailblazers Can Confirm, the Horses Don’t Care if the Jockey’s a Woman . Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe